Stephen Schlesinger

Fellow

Stephen Schlesinger is the former director of the World Policy Institute at the New School (1997–2006) and former publisher of the quarterly magazine, The World Policy Journal. In the early 1970s, he edited and published the New Democrat magazine, and after that spent four years as a staff writer at Time magazine. For twelve years, he served as New York State Governor Mario Cuomo’s speechwriter and foreign policy adviser. In the mid-1990s, he worked at the United Nations at Habitat, the agency dealing with cities. He has also taught at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

He is the author of three books: Act of Creation: The Founding of The United Nations (Basics Books, 2003), for which he won the 2004 Harry S. Truman Book Award; Bitter Fruit: The Story of the U.S. Coup in Guatemala, with Stephen Kinzer (Doubleday, 1982), cited as one of the New York Times’ “notable books” for 1982; and The New Reformers: Forces for Change in American Politics (Houghton Mifflin, 1975). He is the coeditor of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.’s Journals: 1952–2000 (Penguin Press, 2007) and The Letters of Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (Random House, 2013).

A specialist on the foreign policies of the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations, he is a frequent contributor to magazines and newspapers, including the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and the New York Observer. He has appeared on CNN, Fox TV, NPR, NBC, Book TV, MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”, Christopher Matthews “Hardball” and Chuck Todd’s “Daily Rundown”, and other media outlets as well as in seven different documentaries on the UN and two on the 1954 CIA coup in Guatemala. He received his B.A. from Harvard University and his J.D. from Harvard Law School.